Firstly, I would like to say that I am so extremely sorry both to my readers and other members of the blog pack for not posting for all this time. As some of you may or may not know, over a month ago my girlfriend (whom I am stupidly still in love with) broke up with me. As I’m sure a lot of you are older and more experienced than me, considering that while I’m 20, I’m still in the lower age range of EVE players, you’ll know what I mean when I say that when that happens, you just don’t want to do anything at all. Since then I’ve been gaming a hell of a lot less, have barely played EVE, been designing a lot less and haven’t even thought about this blog.

Also, to make matters worse, I have next to no money. Which (along with meaning I have no EVE time) means that come the 12th of December when I have to renew this domain, I won’t have the money to do it. Meaning that for the foreseeable future, Articulatedsky.com won’t be around unless I somehow magically come into some money for the domain renewal fee and every other thing I need money for.

Just thought I should let you guys know before this site disappears from the Internet for a while.

Man, it feels good to be back in the blog pack again. Those of you that weren’t around during the time EVE blogging was just taking off (i.e. when people started noticing that EVE blogs existed*) might not know, but I was one of the original EVE Blog Pack members. Of course a few months later, I started to get behind on EVE and my graphics so I had nothing to blog about. Then that eventually led to me being removed from the pack. Have no fear though! I’m going to do my absolute best to stop that happening again.

* AKA – A couple years ago.

I can’t wait to see whether my addition to the blog pack brings any new readers to the blog. By the way, if you’re a new reader, leave me a comment and let me know that you’re here!

I almost forgot, if you’re sitting there and wondering WTF the EVE blog pack is, click on this linky and wonder no more.

Or…

In other news. Still no updates on the ISP front. Still being disconnected every few minutes so I’ve had to resort borrowing a T-Mobile USB Web and Walk thingymajig, and even that seems to randomly disconnect due to spotty mobile signal in my area. I seem to get blazingly fast HSDPA speeds sometimes but an agonisingly slow GPRS connection most of the time.

On the graphics front, I’ve got two paid (as in real moneys!) jobs lined up. One is going to be a web site design for a game time re-seller, and the other is for a site that I am under orders to keep secret until launch so my money problems should solve themselves sooner rather than later. Well, providing that the communication problems that we’ve been having clear up.

On a more personal note, I am now (not through my own choice) single. Well, to be more specific, I’m in the “will we get back together, won’t we” area. As can be expected with things like this, it’s insanely complicated and probably won’t work itself out for a while.

By the way, I also have copies of the graphics above with black text if any blog pack members wish to use them. That is all.
Good luck fellow new Blog Pack members!

You’re probably wondering where the hell I’ve been over the past few weeks and why I seem to have dropped off the face of the earth.

So, where have I been?

For starters, I’ve been trying to get a bit of extra money to both help with expenses over the summer (being a jobless student means that over the summer, my income amounts to more or less zero) and so I can buy my girlfriend a decent birthday present on her birthday in August.
The way I’ve been trying to go about this has so far been to try and get some freelance graphic design work but it seems that it’s not all that easy. It took me a good week or so to realise that people won’t accept job bids unless I have a portfolio ready to show them. That in itself is impossible seeing as I have done a total of 0 paid jobs, let alone any that I could show off. So off I went to try and design a webpage that I could use a personal portfolio.

Designing a portfolio is haaaaard…

I didn’t realise at first but it really quite hard to design a well designed web page from scratch (via Photoshop) and then get it working in Dreamweaver. I first went in there knowing nothing about what structure I wanted and came out with a design looking relatively okay at first but being a total mess when I took it into the coding stage.
Now we get to around 3 or 4 days ago and I’ve created a few logos for my website (and eventually for any business cards or anything else), mostly for a bit of a distraction so I don’t go ploughing head on into the website design again and make even more design mistakes.
Below, you can find the loads of designs I’m having trouble choosing from. I would be extremely grateful if you could all give me your opinions on which design you prefer. Personally, I like 4, 8 and 9 so you can see why I’m having problems. Although I am leaning more towards 9, I’m still stuck.

Simlish 101

I recently managed to get a copy of The Sims 3 after hearing tons of “Oh my god, you have to play it!” from a ton of friends and while it is a lot like The Sims 1 and 2, I seem to be able to lose hours and hours playing it. For example, yesterday, I started playing it at around 1:00pm; I later came off the computer around an hour later, or so I thought. I had actually been playing for three hours!

Mind you, it was a fun three hours. But I couldn’t help but be a little freaked out at the thought of waking up to my recently dead wife taking a nap on my bed. Luckily, she whooshed back into her urn about half an hour before the elderly Karl (I have a habit of making my first Sim a copy of me) and his teenage son woke up.

EVE Achievements!

Now to what brought me here. Why doesn’t EVE Online have achievements? I would actually fall in love with EVE a lot more than I already am if I also had a load of achievements to pursue while going around doing my everyday activities.
Until a CCP employee reads this and begs their superiors to implement achievements, I can quite very happily make do with a recent addition to the Avatars United application selection, EVE Achievements.
Also, while you’re there, make sure to add me via my Avatars United profile page and help me get my ‘unite with 5 avatars’ profile completeness.

I’m hoping that my recent lack of posting hasn’t turned any of you off from reading my blog and providing all goes well, I should be posting a lot more during the coming weeks. Fly safe!

A short post to give you an update on recent events and the things floating around my head.

More time for EVE!

As I mentioned a couple posts ago, I had almost no time for EVE as the deadline for my Graphic Design course at college was coming closer and closer. Now here we are, a couple weeks later. The deadline has passed and all my work has been handed in and graded.
My initial happiness was quickly shot down as my internet speed was capped (or so I thought) to dial up speeds and I started imagining having to stay up all night over and over to get some EVE time in. Luckily though, this morning I regained my normal internet speed so I think it was just problems with the line or something.

Professional graphics?

Over the summer, I want to properly set up my own personal graphics website to help bring in some money and over the last couple days I’ve been trying to put together a name and logo with little success initially. It didn’t take long though until I got in my stride and cranked out a name and a few prototype logos. Once I’ve bought the domain names in preparation and cranked out a few more logo prototypes, I’ll let you all know and you can give me your opinions on them.

In the mean time, you can still request custom EVE graphics via my email or EVE Mail (Godlesswanderer). You can find my current prices at my Custom EVE Graphics page.

New poll: Should I continue?

I assume you’ve all read my latest attempt at some EVE fan fiction and since there hasn’t been any comments, I’d like to gauge the general feeling of it and whether my fan fiction is good enough for it to be worth me continuing with them (I’ll still be writing them, just not posting them). So, with that said, point those eyes downwards and click away.

So, that time has come again. It’s the end of term at college with two weeks left and that means that the deadlines for my three units (that is Narrative Image Making, Graphics in Advertising and Ideas and Concepts if you’re interested) is coming up hard and fast. To be specific, I have to get all of my work in by this Friday or next Friday at the very very latest.

As you may have already noticed, this sudden rush to get everything done (I’m terrible at organising my time) has stopped me from even thinking about getting onto EVE to do anything more than train skills. And with no time to get onto EVE, I’ve had nothing to blog about.
With that said, if all goes well, I should have all my work done by Friday which will mean that I’ll have the next three weeks from then to get tons done EVE-wise.

Via Akyan on Flickr

In other news, the results are in on the most recent Articulated Sky poll in which I asked whether any of you would be buying the boxed version of EVE Online. It seems that this time around we had more votes than we’ve ever had on a poll only hosted on the blog, numbering at 27 votes at the writing of this post.
Anyway, onto the results.

Of course! – 12 votes – 44%

No – 9 votes – 33%

Not sure yet – 6 votes – 22%

For those of you that voted ‘Of course!’, seeing as I didn’t get the boxed version myself and I’m sure most of you have it by now, care to let me know whether you’re pleased with your purchase, etc?

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